CTP2 of Windows PowerShell V2 Released

Microsoft released Community Technology Preview 2 (CTP2) for Windows PowerShell Version 2, according to an announcement issued last Friday. Windows PowerShell is a shell environment for network administrators with a command-line interface that can be used to automate server management and reporting functions. It works in conjunction with the .NET Framework (specifically .NET 2.0 in the case of CTP2) and features its own dynamically typed scripting language.

Microsoft is releasing the CTP2 of Windows PowerShell V2 to get feedback from users prior to the beta release. This CTP2 is not a beta and should not be run in a production environment, warned a Microsoft blog.

One of the new features in CTP2 is "PowerShell remoting," which lets the operator run commands on "one or more remote computers from a single computer running Windows PowerShell," according to the release notes for CTP2. You can also host Windows PowerShell on Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) and create a network service that supports remote PowerShell sessions.

One user, commenting in the Windows PowerShell discussion group, complained about a lack of remoting support for Microsoft's older operating systems

"CTP2 rips out support for remoting and background jobs on Windows XP and Server 2003, where these features appeared to be working perfectly fine for me with CTP1," he wrote.

The registry in CTP2 now supports transaction processing. Users can start, commit and rollback a transaction via the use of "cmdlets," which are .NET classes designed to carry out a particular operation.

This CTP2 version also features modules, which can be used to organize scripting code into "self-contained, reusable units," according to the release notes.

An "eventing" feature was added to CTP2 that indicates state changes based on system events. PowerShell scripts can be written to subscribe to certain events for synchronous or asynchronous processing.

A graphical version of PowerShell is also part of CTP2, although you need to use .NET Framework 3.0 to enable it.

To download CTP2 for Windows PowerShell V2 and get the release notes, go here.

CTP2 works on "x86 and x64 platforms of Windows XP-SP2, Windows Server 2003-SP2, Windows Vista-SP1, and Windows Server 2008," according to Microsoft.